Wow, its back to the future for me this week. I haven’t been doing face-2-face lectures for years, but this week is campus all over again.
I was honoured to be asked to do a week long PhD seminar at the Universidade Nova de Lisbo here in Lisbon Portugal. The seminar has attracted students and staff from Nova and a few other universities and especially the Univesidade Aberta – Portugese Open University . The seminars are being web cast and sent out via H323 video conferencing, with a twitter feed (mostly in Portugese), all of which have worked flawlessly, so nothing shabby about the technology here!.
Nova University is relatively new to online learning, with no tradition of distance education (that being the almost exclusive domain in the past to The Open University). But as everywhere, they are interested and expanding access through this technology. The lectures were fun in that was able to recycle some of my earlier powerpoints, but was able to expand and hone all of them for a new audience and to dust off some of my earlier work and thinking. I do five sessions:
- Distance Education publishing and open access – with lots borrowed from my friend Olaf Zawacki-Richter
- Research Methods and especially Design based research
- Distance education Theories and Models– with a focus on Community of Inquiry
- My Three generations of DE pedagogy – similar to talk I did in Sydney (very slightly updated, sorry, new ideas do not come all that quickly to old brains…..)
- Open Scholarship (also mostly an update on an earlier talk)
I’ve also had some great meetings with my host Patrica Fidalgo, who is a PhD student at Nova and who we met at last summer’s TEKRI doctoral seminar at Athabasca University. This very successful seminar at Nova shows the value of one PhD student making things happen in her own school. Maybe you should think about attending this year’s week long seminar on social networking at Athabasca in Edmonton???
I’ve spent a few hours seeing the city and its many historical sights, and looking forward to a day off on Saturday before hoping the flight to Estonia.
Até mais tarde!
Terry
It has been great for all of us to have the chance to meet and talk to someone we accessed only through text or at distance. Not altogether the same to study the CoI framework and hear about it from one of its founders.
Thanks Terry
JPaz
Hi Terry,
Thanks for sharing your work, ideas and sympathy. I could only attend Tuesday and Wednesday but found very interesting the topics covered. Congratulations to the Nova University for organizing this seminar.
Hi, Terry
I read your comments and agree but don´t forget de Institue of Education- University of Lisbon. We have a very good e. learning.
I hope you enjoy your country.
Ana Casimiro
Sorry Ana, thanks for the clarification re University of Lisbon.
Terry
I hope you’ve had a good time in Lisbon. I couldn´t make it to the South bank of the river. On Friday, I had classes until six thirty and there was a HUGE traffic jam on the North bank.
I hope that you’ll be invited to Universidade de Lisboa, Institute of Education, soon: this time I figured you’d be having a busy schedule.We’ve started an online Master’s course, the first one in our University e-learning Project.
Wish you a good flight back to Alberta.
My best regards,
Idalina Jorge